Trump Freezes Billions for Chicago Infrastructure Projects Amid Shutdown

“Argentina gets $20 billion and the South Side gets nothing. What happened to America First?” said the city’s Democratic mayor.

Demonstrators stage a protest to raise awareness about the growing threat to democracy posed by President Donald Trump’s political movement and the MAGA right, on April 23, 2025, in Chicago, Illionis.
(Photo by Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Brad Reed
Oct 03, 2025

COMMON DREAMS

Elected leaders in Illinois are calling foul after President Donald Trump froze funding for multiple infrastructure projects in Chicago.

As the Chicago Sun-Times reported, the Trump administration announced on Friday that it is withholding payments for $2.1 billion worth of infrastructure projects in the Windy City, including an extension for Chicago Transit Authority’s Red Line.

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White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought justified the freezes in a post on social media by saying he wanted to “ensure funding is not flowing via race-based contracting.”

Democratic politicians in Illinois, however, accused the White House of abusing its powers to punish political enemies amid the current shutdown of the federal government.

“At a time when federal agents are sowing chaos in Chicago, the Trump administration is holding bipartisan funding hostage,” said Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker in a social media post. “It’s attempting to score political points but is instead hurting our economy and the hardworking people who rely on public transit to get to work or school.”

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson also denounced Trump’s actions and question why he was freezing money for a major American city while green-lighting a bailout of Argentina, which is currently being led by President Javier Milei, a right-wing Trump ally.

“Argentina gets $20 billion and the South Side gets nothing,” he wrote on X. “What happened to America First?”

According to the Sun-Times, Johnson also vowed to fight the administration’s freeze on the Red Line funding, which he said had been a community priority for decades.

“This is not just an egregious act,” he said. “He is working outside of the parameters of what our ordinances and our state law provides for minority and women-owned participation... the South Side has fought for this for 50 years, and we have finally delivered it. And after 50 years of struggle to make sure that the South Side is prioritized, this president is gonna try to disrupt that? Not on my watch.”

Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) warned that the Trump administration might try to permanently block funding for Chicago, which he suggested could become a blueprint for other administration actions against cities whose elected leaders oppose the president.

“I believe there’s a very real chance that the Red Line funding doesn’t go through during the Trump administration,” Quigley told the Sun-Times. “If they can get away with this, I believe they’re going to cut off every bit of federal funding they can to cities, and this is just the start.”

The Trump administration’s actions in Chicago mirror the ones it took in New York City, where Vought announced earlier this week that he was freezing $18 billion worth of spending “to ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional [diversity, equity, and inclusion] principles.”

America’s Toddler-in-Chief: When Personal Grievance Becomes National Policy

If progressives hope to counter Trump effectively, we must remember: We are not simply debating policy, we are confronting a man whose every political act is an attempt to soothe his private wounds.


(Image contains profanity.) Demonstrators raise a six meter high effigy of Donald Trump, being dubbed the “Trump Baby,” in Parliament Square in protest against the US president’s visit to the United Kingdom on July 13, 2018 in London, United Kingdom.
(Photo by Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images)

Michael Bader
Oct 04, 2025

Common Dreams

If someone treats us badly or hurts our feelings, we feel resentful. Such a response is a normal and hard-wired reaction to experiences of rejection, neglect, and criticism. Such resentment might be a passing feeling or it might endure over time. Despite being advised to practice “forgiveness,” it’s possible or even probable that most of us, on some level, remember and keep alive our grievances, usually harboring them in private.

But do you know what normal people don’t do? We don’t draw up an “enemies list,” and make it our mission in life to exact retribution of some kind. If we do, we’re weird and a bit crazy.

Welcome to the psychological world of President Donald Trump. He kicks Jimmy Kimmel off the air because Kimmel makes fun of him. He brings charges against James Comey, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), and the “Biden crime family” because they were critical of him and judged him. When California Gov. Gavin Newsom mocks him, his response is to proudly come up with the nickname, “Gavin Newscum.” He threatens General Mark Milley with “execution” and makes jokes about the violent attack on Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) husband. In response to Bruce Springsteen’s critiques from the stage in Manchester, UK, he attacked the Boss in a highly personal, peculiar, and bizarre way, posting this on Truth Social: “Springsteen is ‘dumb as a rock,’ and couldn’t see what was going on, or could he (which is even worse!)? This dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT!” Trump’s actions and reactions to challenges or criticism of any kind come from an extremely personal, private, and insecure place, reminiscent of kids slinging insults in a schoolyard.

In other words, Trump turns everything political into something personal. His personal psychology is on display in his public actions all the time—it’s hiding in plain sight. And any guardrails or censor that should normally maintain a screen or at least some separation between his personal psychology and his public role have completely disintegrated, if it they were ever there to begin with. A leader unable to keep these two domains separate is invariably weakened and ineffective, and we’re all paying the price for this breakdown.

Trump’s interior life is a clown car of neurotic conflicts that have seized control of his executive functions and shape his every public statement and action.

A senior consultant in Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation used to teach progressive leaders that there is—and should be—a difference between public and private values, that in private life, relationships are ends in themselves while for public actors, relationships are, and should be, more instrumental and transactional. Self-sacrifice is normal in personal relationships, while self-interest guides public action. For political leaders, personal gratification should take a backseat to public service. Of course, there is often a blurring of these boundaries, but, in general, when these domains get too confused, the consequences are usually disastrous. We see in Donald Trump an extreme example of what happens when someone in public is unable to separate the pressures of his or her private psychology and public actions.

In Donald Trump’s world, the political is always personal. Barriers between the two worlds, the sort of censors and self-restraint that effective leaders are obligated to exercise in public life, have completely collapsed. You don’t need to be Freud to see how much his policies are suffused with his personal and private needs, defenses, and insecurities. He attacks Canada because its leaders had a “nasty” response to his suggestion that it become our 51st state. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is “disrespectful,” and so Trump withholds aid. His ignorance about policy reflects the fact that he recklessly acts on private impulses and not thoughtful reflection. He lies compulsively and continually, and always in the service of bombastic claims of perfection and self-exoneration. He frees criminals and criminalizes dissent, not out of high-minded principles but out of base impulses involving his personal narcissistic needs and vulnerabilities—not public interests.

Obviously, public figures and leaders are human beings with personal psychologies that invariably influence their public political actions. Effective leaders, however, learn to subordinate or at least sublimate personal psychological conflicts in the interest of being politically strategic, negotiating compromises, and focusing in a laser-like way on those desirable political outcomes that serve a broader good. No one is saying that politicians leave their egos at the door, but, rather, that the best ones seek to restrain these egos in order to achieve their political goals.

Trump is the opposite. He acts (out) entirely on the basis of personal animus and internal conflicts and then, only retroactively, spins a tale that paints his words and actions as principled or visionary. He will act on a small-minded personal impulse like humiliating Zelenskyy (who was “disrespectful”) in the Oval Office, but then argue that what was clearly an idiosyncratic personal response was really part of his efforts to single-handedly solve the Ukraine-Russian war and insure world peace. He feels slighted by other world leaders and then reactively trash talks them in public, all the while implying that his derogatory language and claims are really part of his efforts to make America great again and to promote a high-minded “America First” agenda without a hint of awareness that the real psychic motivation behind his actions involves making him, on a purely personal level, “great” and “first.”

The nature of the psychological engine that drives Trump to so constantly leak his personal issues onto his public political postures, the real reasons he simply cannot keep the seamier sides of his psychology from flooding his actions as president, all stem from his core psychological makeup. Again, let’s be clear: Trump’s psychology is hiding in plain sight. This isn’t some long-distance psychiatric conjecture or diagnosis. Trump is driven to avoid or refute any situation, any moment, in which he might potentially feel or be seen as one-down, inadequate, inferior, or otherwise a failure. He lives in dire fear of such feelings and instinctively, automatically, and desperately has to go out of his way to communicate the opposite. We see it every day. We see it in Trump’s constant clownish boasting and self-aggrandizing arrogance. When the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal suggested business sentiment had soured in response to his tariffs, Trump lashed back, calling it “globalist,” “antiquated,” and “very bad for the USA”—before promising, absurdly, that “we will WIN on everything!!!”

Everyone is so used to Trump’s compulsive sense of grievance and defensive arrogance that it no longer seems to be as much the impairment that it actually is. No one blinks an eye when he makes remarks, barely concealed within his word salad, about “having the best words,” being “the best President for black people since Abraham Lincoln,” or knowing more about taxes, the military, climate change—well, pretty much everything—than the world’s experts.

My point here is that Trump has no choice, no freedom at all, to edit or censor remarks like these because the psychic threats they seek to mitigate—feelings of shame, inferiority, or failure—are so threatening to him that they leave him no room at all to be cautious, modest, or to seek common ground. While all politicians, like all people, bring their personal psychologies into their public work lives, Trump’s interior life is a clown car of neurotic conflicts that have seized control of his executive functions and shape his every public statement and action.

This is exactly why Trump can’t tolerate Newsom’s mocking tweets. They hit him exactly where it hurts the most, namely, his ego, his narcissism, and his profound insecurities connected to feeling small, to being seen in any way as a loser. And this is the precise tone that those of us in the progressive opposition should take when we challenge the Trump regime in public.

There is nothing funny, nothing at all, about the systemic harm that Trump is inflicting on all of us. And our struggle to repair and reverse such harm involves gaining and wielding political power and not psychiatric explanation. But if progressives hope to counter Trump effectively, we must remember: We are not simply debating policy. We are confronting a man whose every political act is an attempt to soothe his private wounds. Exposing that truth is not a sideshow. It is part of the strategy.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Michael Bader
Michael Bader, DMH is a psychologist and psychoanalyst with over 40 years of experience. He has published extensively (see michaelbader.com) on issues at the intersection of psychology, politics, and culture.
Full Bio >

Climate Villains Deserve the Hell They’re Making on Earth

Reincarnation on a future overheated Earth might be an appropriate “reward” for government and private leaders responsible for obstructing the progress of green energy.


Wildfires burn in Los Angeles.
(Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Paul F. Delespinasse
Oct 04, 2025

Common Dreams


As imagined by Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) in The Divine Comedy, Hell has nine levels, with the lowest reserved for the very worst souls. Although it is no longer fashionable to believe that Hell exists, we can’t prove that it doesn’t. And it is generally thought that among its tortures for condemned souls are extremely high temperatures.

If the climate continues heating up we may create hellish conditions right here on an overheated Earth. Would it be appropriate for those responsible for allowing this to happen to end in an actual Hell? As the Lord High Executioner sings in The Mikado, “My object all sublime... is to make the punishment fit the crime.”

..



‘Time to Make Polluters Pay’: Study Ties Fossil Fuel Pollution Directly to Deadly Heatwaves



Climate Defenders Blast Trump’s ‘Reckless’ UN Speech

Or perhaps the guilty parties could be reincarnated on the unpleasant future Earth they are helping create. Like Hell, which no one can prove does not exist, no one has ever proved that reincarnation is impossible.

So in case there is no Hell, Earth itself might take care of inflicting cosmic justice.

I imagine that Hell, if it exists, or a future overheated Earth, will have ample room for guilty members of Congress and the Supreme Court; coal, gas, and oil company executives; and the like.

Of course as a mere mortal human being, I cannot claim to be a perfect judge of my fellow mortals. But it seems to me that many current American leaders will bear heavy responsibility if we do not curb global warming in time to avoid catastrophe. I say leaders in the plural here deliberately, since no one person—not even a president—could do the damage currently being done by American policy without the help of other leaders.

I imagine that Hell, if it exists, or a future overheated Earth, will have ample room for guilty members of Congress and the Supreme Court; coal, gas, and oil company executives; and the like.

President Donald Trump began his second administration by withdrawing the US again from the Paris Agreement to fight climate change. Although “only” a symbolic action, it telegraphed the new administration’s intentions to sabotage green energy.

Non-symbolic actions quickly followed. It is bad enough that the government has been canceling subsidy programs designed to hasten the day when solar and wind energy replace coal, oil, and gas.

Far worse, the administration is trying to prevent completion of major wind farms that are already largely built and in which people have invested billions of dollars. This makes no sense economically and will increase the electricity shortages already causing big increases in consumer prices.

And the administration is canceling permissions for new green projects that government agencies had already granted.

Worse still is the administration’s attempt to force other countries to halt their own policies aimed at replacing dirty electricity with green electricity, using tariff rates as bargaining chips. As long as only the US slows down needed reforms, the rest of the world could at least move forward.

From a geopolitical point of view, recent US policies are making China look better and better, as it appears destined to dominate production of green energy and electric vehicles. The US continues to dominate declining industries like coal, gas, and oil—the modern equivalents of buggy whips.

Perhaps most outrageous of all (so far!) is the administration’s attempt to turn off functioning satellites already in orbit that can measure carbon dioxide and methane—the chief warming agents in the atmosphere—as an “economy” measure!

Economy measure?! As ”Swami Beyondananda” recently put it, “If we lose the Earth, there goes the GDP.”

In the same vein, the Trump Environmental Protection Agency now proposes to stop requiring corporations to measure and report the amount of greenhouse gases they are releasing into the atmosphere.

The administration is also trying to close down its Mauna Loa installation in Hawaii and three other places measuring greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere.

Apparently the administration fears that all these measurements will undermine its already feeble arguments that it is safe to continue burning coal, oil, and gas to produce the power required by modern civilization.

As I noted earlier, reincarnation on a future overheated Earth might be an appropriate “reward” for government and private leaders responsible for obstructing the progress of green energy.

But from another point of view, an actual Hell might provide more justice for them.

Hell has no air conditioners.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Paul F. Delespinasse
Paul F. deLespinasse, who now lives in Oregon, is professor emeritus of political science at Adrian College in Michigan. He can be reached via his website, www.deLespinasse.org.
Full Bio >

‘People’s Jobs Report’ From Economic Justice Campaigners Shows Harm of GOP Policies

“Trump stopped the Bureau of Labor Statistics from releasing its monthly jobs report,” said one advocate. “But people deserve to know just how bad Trump’s economy is.”


Julia Conley
Oct 03, 2025

COMMON DREAMS

With the US government entering the third day of a shutdown Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics didn’t release the monthly jobs report as scheduled—but one economic justice group said that even without the official analysis of the labor market, it’s clear that President Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s policies have “devastated workers and families,” with the shutdown making matters worse for millions.

Unrig Our Economy provided its own People’s Jobs Report to “fill the gaps” left by Republicans, who have refused to agree to Democrats’ demands to extend Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies and reverse Medicaid cuts in a spending bill to keep the government open.

‘Business Continues to Be Severely Depressed’: New Reports Paint Dark Picture of Trump Economy

Trump-GOP Hiding Federal Data So Nobody Will Know the Depth of the Destruction They Are Sowing

Trump and GOP leaders have falsely claimed that Democrats are demanding “free healthcare” for undocumented immigrants—who are not eligible for government-run healthcare programs like Medicaid. The Democratic Party and experts have warned that the expiration of the ACA subsidies would raise healthcare premiums by 75% for millions of Americans.

Unrig Our Economy noted in its “Jobs Day” report that the expiration of the tax credits could also cost the US economy nearly 300,000 jobs in the next year, including 130,000 jobs lost “because of direct reductions in the provision of hospital, physician, and other ambulatory care as well as reductions in pharmacy-related services.”

As the Commonwealth Fund reported in March, 156,000 jobs could be lost next year in sectors including manufacturing, retail, and real estate “as a result of the indirect or induced effects of healthcare funding losses,” with rural communities among the hardest-hit areas.

“This ‘People’s Jobs Report’ from Unrig Our Economy shows how destructive Republican policies have been on the economy.”

Those projected losses would compound “some of the most alarming economic developments” under the Republican-controlled government, said Unrig Our Economy.

The group cited an ADP report which found that while official statistics can’t be reported as long as the BLS is closed, US companies shed an estimated 32,000 jobs in September.

About 13,000 jobs were lost in June, the group noted—the first time the economy lost jobs since 2020. The unemployment rate in last month’s BLS report stood at 4.3%—the highest it’s been since 2021.

Unemployment claims also rose to nearly 2 million in August—the highest since 2021—while Trump’s tariff policies have “caused chaos for employers” including small businesses, where employment has dropped by 26,700 since the president took office for his second term in January.

“In tariff-related industries, payrolls fell by 90,100 jobs, including 42,000 jobs in manufacturing,” said Unrig Our Economy. “Wholesale trade jobs fell by more than 26,000 since January and mining and logging jobs fell by 12,000 during the same period.”

The group released its report a day after Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called on the federal government to move forward with releasing the official jobs report despite the government shut down. Democrats have warned that the Trump administration has kept Americans in the dark about the true state of the economy, including when the president demanded the firing of Erika McEntarfer, who until August was the commissioner of the BLS.

McEntarfer was dismissed after the agency released a jobs report that showed the economy had added only 73,000 jobs in July—data that Trump baselessly claimed had been falsified to harm him politically. Her departure, however, didn’t stop the flow of negative news about the economy under Republican leadership; the jobs report released in early September showed only 22,000 jobs created the previous month.

“Donald Trump’s economic agenda is inflicting massive pain on our economy and to add to the economic uncertainty, he’s shut down the government rather than save healthcare for millions of Americans,” said Warren on Thursday. “But let’s be clear: The jobs data scheduled to come out this Friday has undoubtedly been collected and the president must release it. Without it, the Federal Reserve will not have the full picture it needs to make decisions this month about interest rates that will impact every family across the country. Donald Trump has the power to make sure the federal government can continue producing and releasing this critical information on Friday and beyond during his shutdown.”

William Beach, a former commissioner of the BLS, said this week that the September jobs data has been collected.

“Trump stopped the Bureau of Labor Statistics from releasing its monthly jobs report because Americans are struggling, and the numbers are disastrous,” said Alexandra De Luca of American Bridge 21st Century. “But people deserve to know just how bad Trump’s economy is.”

A Bloomberg poll of economists found that employers likely added 53,000 jobs last month—fewer than the average of 64,000 added over the previous six months—and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago estimated that the unemployment rate has remained at 4.3%.

“Working people deserve a government that lowers their healthcare costs and creates good-paying jobs,” said Leor Tal, Unrig Our Economy campaign director Leor Tal. “This People’s Jobs Report from Unrig Our Economy shows how destructive Republican policies have been on the economy. Not only are Republicans in Congress tanking the economy by raising costs on families and cutting essential programs that help them make ends meet, but they’re destroying jobs too—all while giving billionaires massive tax breaks.”

‘Business Continues to Be Severely Depressed’: New Reports Paint Dark Picture of Trump Economy

“The addition of the derivative steel and aluminum tariffs in the middle of the month... was devastating,” said one manufacturing executive.

A trader works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) at the opening bell on October 1, 2025, in New York City.
(Photo by Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images

Brad Reed
Oct 01, 2025
COMMON DREAMS

Two reports released Wednesday paint an increasingly dark picture of the American economy under US President Donald Trump, matching predictions that his tax policy and chaotic tariffs would ultimately harm workers and put a drag on the nation’s financial outlook.

First, processing firm ADP estimated in its latest monthly report that the US economy lost 32,000 jobs in September, with contractions in employment happening across multiple industries.

The leisure and hospitality industry was hardest hit, as ADP estimated it lost 19,000 jobs last month, followed by professional and business services, which lost an estimated 13,000 jobs, and financial activities, which lost an estimated 9,000 jobs.

Small businesses took the biggest hit, as they shed 40,000 employees on the month, ADP estimated.

Nela Richardson, chief economist at ADP, said these latest numbers validate “what we’ve been seeing in the labor market, that US employers have been cautious with hiring.”

The ADP report is not seen as reliable as the monthly jobs report issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, although that report will not be released on Friday as previously scheduled due to the current shutdown of the federal government.

In addition to the ADP survey, the latest ISM Manufacturing PMI Report revealed that the “manufacturing sector contracted in September for the seventh consecutive month” amid uncertainty caused in large part by Trump’s tariffs.

Comments made by executives in the new ISM survey point to a dire situation facing many US manufacturers.

“Business continues to be severely depressed,” said one respondent. “Profits are down and extreme taxes (tariffs) are being shouldered by all companies in our space. We have increased price pressures both to our inputs and customer outputs as companies are starting to pass on tariffs via surcharges, raising prices up to 20 percent.”

This executive, who works for a transportation equipment firm, added that “the addition of the derivative steel and aluminum tariffs in the middle of the month—with no announcement—was devastating.”

An executive at an electrical equipment supplier, meanwhile, said that “customer orders are depressed for heavy machinery because tariffs are so impactful to high-end capital equipment.” The executive said their company’s revenue projections were flat for the rest of the year, with “no outlook to improve in 2026.”

Another manufacturing executive simply said, “Steel tariffs are killing us.”

This gloomy sentiment isn’t just shared by business executives, but also US consumers. The Conference Board on Tuesday released its Consumer Confidence Index showing a “sharp deterioration in consumers’ views of the current economic situation” in the US.

Stephanie Guichard, senior economist at The Conference Board, noted that consumer confidence numbers are now the lowest they’ve been since April 2025, when Trump sent shockwaves through the economy by announcing his so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs that he partially backed away from in the face of a cratering stock market.

“Consumers’ assessment of business conditions was much less positive than in recent months, while their appraisal of current job availability fell for the ninth straight month to reach a new multiyear low,” Guichard explained. “This is consistent with the decline in job openings.”

The Conference Board also found that consumers’ short-term outlook for income, business, and labor market conditions was once again below the threshold that “typically signals a recession ahead.”

GUNBOAT DIPLOMACY

After Bombing Boats, Trump Tells Congress US Is in ‘Armed Conflict’ With Drug Cartels

“This is not stretching the envelope,” said a retired judge advocate general lawyer. “This is shredding it. This is tearing it apart.”


This image was posted on social media by President Donald Trump and shows a boat that was allegedly transporting cocaine off the coast of Venezuela when it was destroyed by US forces on September 2, 2025.
(Photo: President Donald Trump/Truth Social)

Jessica Corbett
Oct 02, 2025
COMMON DREAMS

President Donald Trump’s administration claimed that the United States is in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels in a confidential notice to Congress this week intended to justify his deadly bombings of alleged smuggling boats in the Caribbean.

Democrats in Congress and legal officials have been challenging the legality of the three military strikes Trump announced last month. A woman who identified herself as the wife of one of the at least 17 people extrajudicially killed in the US bombings said her husband was a fisher.



‘Patently Illegal’: Experts Raise Major Red Flags About Trump’s Drug Boat Bombings




“Congress was notified about the designation by Pentagon officials on Wednesday,” according to The Associated Press, one of several outlets that obtained the notice. The New York Times reported that it “was sent to several congressional committees.”

NewsNation‘s Kellie Meyer posted the full memo on social media:



After citing a relevant section from the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2024, the notice describes decades of law enforcement efforts to stem the flow of illicit narcotics into the United States as “unsuccessful,” and says that cartels “illegally and directly cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of American citizens each year.”

“The president determined these cartels are nonstate armed groups, designated them as terrorist organizations, and determined that their actions constitute an armed attack against the United States,” the document continues. Trump also “determined that the United States is in a non-international armed conflict with these designated terrorist organizations” and directed the US Department of Defense, which he has dubbed the Department of War, “to conduct operations against them.”

“The United States has now reached a critical point where we must use force in self-defense and defense of others against the ongoing attacks by these designated terrorist organizations,” adds the memo, which notes the second strike on September 15.

Lawmakers and legal experts again challenged the administration’s claim that, as the notice put it, Trump directed the bombings under “his constitutional authority as commander in chief and chief executive to conduct foreign relations.”

As the Times reported:
Geoffrey S. Corn, a retired judge advocate general lawyer who was formerly the Army’s senior adviser for law-of-war issues, said drug cartels were not engaged in “hostilities”—the standard for when there is an armed conflict for legal purposes—against the United States because selling a dangerous product is different from an armed attack.

Noting that it is illegal for the military to deliberately target civilians who are not directly participating in hostilities—even suspected criminals—Mr. Corn called the president’s move an “abuse” that crossed a major legal line.

“This is not stretching the envelope,” he said. “This is shredding it. This is tearing it apart.”

New York University School of Law professor Ryan Goodman, who served as special counsel to the general counsel of the Defense Department during the Obama administration, said on social media that Corn was “completely right.”

“Drug cartels not = ‘armed conflict,‘” Goodman added, stressing that the “people killed” in such strikes “are civilians.”



Rutgers University law professor Adil Haque similarly pushed back on social media, saying: “The United States is not in a ‘non-international armed conflict’ with drug cartels. Cartels are not organized as armed groups, nor are they engaged in intense hostilities. These are dangerous criminal organizations and should be confronted using law enforcement tools.”

Members of Congress also publicly weighed in, including Senate Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Jack Reed (D-RI), who said that “every American should be alarmed that President Trump has decided he can wage secret wars against anyone he labels an enemy. Drug cartels must be stopped, but declaring war and ordering lethal military force without Congress or public knowledge—nor legal justification—is unacceptable.”

At least two of the strikes have occurred off the coast of Venezuela, elevating fears of an armed conflict with the country.



“Trump’s actions are illegal, unconstitutional, and dangerous,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said in response to the new memo. ”He is leading us willy-nilly into war with Venezuela. I have ‘determined’ that this is a terrible idea.”

Video: U.S. Reports New Strike on Suspected Drug Cartel Boat off Venezuela

Small boat burning after it was struck by U.S. forces somewhere in the Caribbean

Published Oct 3, 2025 3:32 PM by The Maritime Executive

 

The U.S. military reports that it has struck an additional suspected drug cartel boat off Venezuela earlier today, Friday, October 3. The announcement came after word leaked of a White House briefing memo to the U.S. Congress declaring that the country is in a “non-international armed conflict” with South American drug cartels.

Pete Hegseth posted a video and a brief report to social media Friday morning. It shows a small boat, which they said was in international waters near Venezuela, being tracked, struck, and left burning on the surface. The U.S. says four males aboard the boat were killed by the strike.

Hegseth asserts that the boat was transporting substantial amounts of narcotics headed to the United States. “Our intelligence, without a doubt, confirmed that this vessel was trafficking narcotics,” the message asserts. It says the vessel was operating on a known narco-traffic transit route and calls the individuals aboard “narco-terrorists.”

 

 

The strike comes as the U.S. Southern Command reported at the beginning of the week that U.S. forces working with allies seized or disrupted more than one million pounds of cocaine during counterdrug operations in the past 12 months. They valued the drugs at an estimated $11.34 billion and said they could have been 377 million potentially lethal doses.

This was the fourth or fifth strike the White House and Hegseth have acknowledged since the start of September. The first, which came on September 2, is the most controversial as it reportedly killed 11 people, leading to questions about whether it could have been a migrant boat. The U.S. confirmed a second strike on September 15 and a third on September 19, each of which it said killed three individuals. No proof was provided that the boats were loaded with drugs and that they were operated by cartel members.

The notification to Congress required under the National Defense Authorization Act was first reported by The New York Times and has subsequently also been seen by CBS News. The organizations report more forceful language, including “armed attacks” and “unlawful combatants,” used to describe the actions in mid-September. 

U.S. law requires the notifications and prohibits the military from deliberately killing civilians. Congress has not authorized the use of lethal force, although the Trump administration is now telling Congress it has determined that the U.S. is engaged in an armed conflict with the drug cartels, which the White House has designated as terrorist groups.

It comes as there have also been reports of a U.S. military buildup in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. Venezuela asserts the U.S. is attacking with unconfirmed reports that the U.S. is preparing to strike Venezuela's harbors and airfields. 

Hegseth, in his message today, said the strikes will continue until the attacks on the American people are over.

‘This Is Murder’: Trump Bombs Another Boat

 in Caribbean

“The US government must be held accountable,” said Amnesty International USA.


US President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that they bombed another boat in the Caribbean on October 3, 2025.
(Photo: screenshot/Donald Trump/Truth Social)

Jessica Corbett
Oct 03, 2025
COMMON DREAMS

President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced on social media Friday that they bombed another boat in the Caribbean—at least the fourth alleged drug-smuggling vessel attacked by the US military since early September.

Critics, including congressional Democrats, legal scholars, and human rights groups, have stressed that even if any of the boats recently bombed by the Trump administration were trafficking drugs, the strikes still violate international and federal law. Such criticism has not deterred the administration.




Hegseth, who leads what Trump renamed the Department of War, said Friday that “earlier this morning, on President Trump’s orders, I directed a lethal, kinetic strike on a narco-trafficking vessel affiliated with designated terrorist organizations. Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed in the strike, and no US forces were harmed in the operation.”

“The strike was conducted in international waters just off the coast of Venezuela while the vessel was transporting substantial amounts of narcotics—headed to America to poison our people,” wrote the Pentagon chief, including a video of the bombing, but no evidence that the boat was involved in running drugs.

Hegseth claimed that “our intelligence, without a doubt, confirmed that this vessel was trafficking narcotics, the people onboard were narco-terrorists, and they were operating on a known narco-trafficking transit route. These strikes will continue until the attacks on the American people are over!!!!”

Trump similarly said, without offering any proof, that “a boat loaded with enough drugs to kill 25 TO 50 THOUSAND PEOPLE was stopped, early this morning off the Coast of Venezuela, from entering American Territory.”



Responding to the latest lethal bombing, Amnesty International USA declared: “This is murder. The US government must be held accountable.”

Richard Painter, a University of Minnesota law professor who served as chief White House ethics counsel under former President George W. Bush, said, “Again, this is a violation of international law, and without the consent of Congress a violation of federal law.”

The strikes come amid Trump’s ”aggressive pursuit” of a Nobel Peace Prize. Nodding to this, Congressman Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.) wrote on social media Friday, “To President Trump: They don’t give Nobel Peace Prizes to people who murder civilians without a trial.”

The first confirmed bombing, on September 2, killed 11 people. The second and third, on September 15 and 19, each killed three. In at least one case, a woman who identified herself as the wife of one of the men killed said her husband was a fisher.

Friday’s bombing followed the leak of a confidential notice that the administration sent to multiple congressional committees this week, attempting to legally justify the bombings. It says in part, “The president determined these cartels are nonstate armed groups, designated them as terrorist organizations, and determined that their actions constitute an armed attack against the United States.”

Multiple legal experts and members of Congress publicly weighed in on the memo, including Senate Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Jack Reed (D-RI), who said that “every American should be alarmed that President Trump has decided he can wage secret wars against anyone he labels an enemy.”

After the Friday attack, Tess Bridgeman, co-editor-in-chief of Just Security and a nonresident senior fellow at New York University School of Law, emphasized that “if it can happen at sea, it can happen anywhere.”

“Trump has offered no definition or limiting principle for who can be labeled a ‘terrorist’ and summarily killed,” she added. “And no plausible legal theory for why an armed conflict exists.”

CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA

Trump to Slash Refugee Numbers to Record Low, With White South Africans Taking Most Spots

While the president spreads false claims about a “genocide” against white people in South Africa, “more than 100,000 refugees from Afghanistan, Sudan, Ukraine, etc.” are stranded in refugee camps.

South African internet personality and Afrikaner commentator Willem Petzer addresses a group of white South Africans supporting US President Donald Trump in front of the US Embassy in Pretoria, on February 15, 2025.
(Photo by Marco Longari / AFP)

Julia Conley
Oct 04, 2025
COMMON DREAMS


Reports of the Trump administration’s plan to slash refugee admissions to an even lower number than previously stated—with the majority of spots given to white South Africans descended from French and Dutch colonists who arrived in the country in the 17th century—represents “a moral failure and a dark hour for our country,” according to one refugee policy expert.

As The New York Times reported late Friday, a presidential determination dated September 30 and signed by President Donald Trump showed that the president aims to cap refugee admissions at 7,500 in 2026—a significant decrease from the 40,000 that he previously discussed with officials, and from the 125,000 cap set by the Biden administration last year.

A White House official told the Times that the refugee limit would be final only after the administration consults with Congress, as it’s required to do under the Refugee Act. They added that consultation with the House and Senate Judiciary committees will be possible only after Democrats and Republicans reach a deal to fund the government and end the shutdown that began October 1.

But advocates and Democrats have pointed out in recent days that the White House’s deadline for consulting with lawmakers on refugee limits for next year was September 30, before the shutdown began.

As the deadline passed this week, Democratic leaders said that “in open defiance of the law, the Trump administration has failed to schedule the legally required consultation.”

“Despite repeated outreach from Democratic and Republican committee staff, the Trump administration has completely discarded its legal obligation, leaving Congress in the dark and refugees in limbo,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee; Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), ranking member of the Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement; Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee; and Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), ranking member for the Subcommittee on Border Security and Immigration.

The president effectively suspended the US State Department’s 40-year-old refugee resettlement program on his first day in office. The program requires refugees fleeing conflict, famine, and persecution to pass background checks and medical exams before entering the country, and often involves yearslong waits in refugee camps before they are resettled in the US.

“What began as a so-called ‘suspension’ has now stretched into an eight-month shutdown, betraying the nation’s promise as a refuge for the oppressed,” said the Democrats. “Nearly 130,000 people facing persecution abroad who have already passed the rigorous vetting requirements of our refugee program have been abandoned by this administration, left to languish in refugee camps around the world after being given the promise of safety and a new life in America.”

But for white South African farmers, also known as Afrikaners, Trump carved out an exception earlier this year that will reportedly be extended into 2026—allowing them “to skip the line and rigorous vetting as countless others are shut out of the US,” said the Democrats.

Trump and his billionaire megadonor, South Africa-born Elon Musk, have helped spread false claims that the country’s democratically elected Black government has systematically oppressed white Afrikaners, who enforced a racist apartheid system until 1994, and has allowed white farmers to be murdered—saying white people in the country face a “genocide.”

White South Africans hold 20 times the wealth of Black people in the country despite making up just 7% of the population, and control the vast majority of land.

“Poor Black citizens of South Africa are far more likely to be victims of violent crime and murder than white people,” wrote Joe Walsh at Current Affairs last year, noting that during one period, “when there were 49 murders on farms across the entire country, one of Cape Town’s predominantly Black townships called Khayelitsha recorded 179 murders, at a rate of approximately 116 per 100,000 people.”

While Trump plans to open the door to thousands of white South Africans, said Danilo Zak, director of policy at Church World Service, “more than 100,000 refugees from Afghanistan, Sudan, Ukraine, etc., who have been through years of vetting, approved, [are] now left stranded.”

With Trump’s determination on refugee numbers “already signed and dated,” said Zak, it’s impossible for Trump to have completed an “appropriate consultation” with Congress to approve the abandonment of refugees across the world.



Trump previously set a record low number for refugee admissions during his first term, imposing a cap of 15,000 slots for resettlement.

The new plan was reported as the US Supreme Court ruled for the second time in four months in favor of allowing the president to revoke Temporary Protected Status for 300,000 Venezuelans, putting them at risk for deportation—despite an earlier ruling by a federal judge who found Trump had acted illegally when he moved to revoke TPS.

“This decision threatens not only the lives of hundreds of thousands of people who will lose legal status and face deportation,” said Todd Schulte, president of FWD.us, “but also a basic sense of fairness.”

Eisenhower Library head resigns after struggle with Trump and Melania over sword

Tom Boggioni
October 2, 2025 

RAW STORY


U.S. first lady Melania Trump relays a reporter's question to President Donald Trump. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

A decision by First Lady Melania Trump on a gift for King Charles III contributed to the resignation of the director of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Museum and Boyhood Home, reports CBS News.

For their visit to the U.K. weeks ago, the first lady was handed a list of possible gifts by aides to bestow upon the monarch and her choice of a sword from the museum's collection caused a furor with Todd Arrington, a career historian, who balked at giving away the artifact from the collection.

According to the report, “Arrington's departure came after he resisted taking an original Eisenhower sword out of the library's collection,” adding, “Eisenhower possessed several swords, including a Sword of Honor given to him in 1947 by the city of London for his role as allied supreme commander during World War II, an honor saber gifted to him by the Netherlands in 1947, and his West Point officer saber.”

Despite Arrington’s suggestion that a replica could be found to use as a gift, the president’s wife held firm, which reportedly led to his departure.

The report notes, “Ultimately, West Point provided a faux version of Eisenhower's sword from the military academy,” but there was already tension between Arrington and the administration with CBS reporting, “One administration official said Arrington was believed to have spoken critically about the president and the administration.”

You can read more here.

One appalling spectacle showed we are on the brink of true dictatorship

Thom Hartmann
October 2, 2025 

COMMON DREAMS

BIG BROTHER

A banner depicting Donald Trump hangs on a government building. 

REUTERS/Nathan Howard

Most jobs have a “playbook,” a sort of instruction manual or checklist for how to do the job right, whether it’s running an assembly line, piloting an aircraft, or redoing a house’s plumbing.

Although our media seems oblivious to it, dictators have a playbook, too.

It’s one that’s been carefully followed in recent times by Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Rodrigo Duterte, Jair Bolsonaro, and numerous initially-elected leaders of other smaller nations. In previous generations the Dictator’s Playbook was followed, step-by-step, by Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, Ferdinand Marcos, Agustin Pinochet, Josef Stalin, and Hideki Tojo (among others).

And now it’s being followed by Donald Trump and JD Vance, who are a bit more than halfway through the list. Trump’s speech on Tuesday before our assembled generals and admirals — telling them they should use our American cities as “training grounds” for the military whose job is to “kill people and break things” — is getting us closer to the final steps.
“We are under invasion from within,” Trump said, “no different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways, because they don’t wear uniforms. … We’re under invasion from within.”

And who is this enemy that’s so bad, so evil, that Trump just declared war against? He was explicit that the “enemies” are his political opponents and average people who live in our big cities:

“The ones that are run by the radical left Democrats ... what they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they’re very unsafe places. And we’re going to straighten them out one by one. This is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.”

What’s most astonishing about the reporting on this meeting is that none of the media I follow have even once mentioned that militarizing the nation’s cities is one of the most significant steps in the Dictator’s Playbook.

Combine that with the demand for absolute loyalty to the Dear Leader — Trump told the generals “If you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room” — and he’s declared himself the absolute ruler of America wielding the most lethal military in the history of the world against our nation’s own citizens.

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow recently laid out five moves that dictators reliably make.First, they identify an internal enemy to blame for social ills; Trump has spent years turning immigrants, big cities, and universities into scapegoats. Now, like every dictator listed above has done, he’s claiming that the opposition political party, the Democrats, are an “enemy within.”
Second, they turn security forces inward, exactly what Trump’s new call for turning our military against our cities represents. The moment a dictator turns military forces built to destroy foreign adversaries against his own people, the rest of the transformation becomes easier.
Third, they criminalize dissent and protest, insisting that when people show up in the streets it is not constitutionally protected free speech and the right “peaceably to assemble and petition the Government for a redress of grievances” but a security “threat” to be crushed rather than heard and responded to.
Fourth, they intimidate or capture the press and punish truth-telling, as we’re seeing now with rightwing billionaires capturing virtually every major traditional and social media source in America.
Fifth, they seize control of independent institutions like universities, law firms, or the civil service to eliminate any professional standards that interfere with Dear Leader’s will.


Overlay that list with the work of historians and political scientists like Timothy Snyder, Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Jason Stanley, and M. Gessen. Their research on how democracies die all point to the same ingredients:Deny or rewrite election results to delegitimize democracy itself.
Declare political opponents enemies of the state.
Turn independent institutions like the Department of Justice, the civil service, and the military into personal tools.
Flood the public square with lies so thoroughly (Steve Bannon proudly called it “flooding the zone with shit”) that reality itself becomes negotiable.
Tolerate or celebrate political violence on behalf of the dictator, and demonize violence against his followers and mouthpieces as sedition and treason.
Demand personal loyalty instead of constitutional duty.
Invoke a mythic past and promise national rebirth if only the strongman is given total sovereignty.
Use his office to rapidly enrich himself and his family while creating a patronage network of loyalists who owe their fortunes to him.

There is also the money. Autocrats rarely forget to convert state power into private wealth. Trump’s hotels, golf courses, and commercial properties brought in millions from foreign governments during his first time in office, as documented by House Oversight Committee findings.


His son-in-law Jared Kushner secured a two-billion-dollar investment from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund almost immediately after leaving the White House. Ivanka Trump picked up fast-tracked Chinese trademarks while advising her father in government.

Kleptocracy is not a side effect of authoritarianism or fascism: it’s essential, particularly when some of that fortune is shared with those willing to break the law to support Dear Leader. So far, according to reporting, Trump and his family have made at least $5 billion from his 9-month-long presidency. It’s a core feature of the Dictator’s Playbook.

And when people protest the theft of the nation’s resources and the personal enrichment based on handing out favors, dictators go after them in the most brutal ways imaginable. It begins with investigations, but never ends there. Just look at what he’s doing to James Comey and Miles Taylor.


And now Trump has issued a National Security Presidential Memorandum that essentially says Democrats, atheists, Muslims, Jews, socialists, and queer people are terrorists. Not because of anything they’ve done, but because of who they are or what they believe.

It directs the FBI, DOJ, and over 200 Joint Terrorism Task Forces coordinated with police forces across the country to investigate anybody who meet it’s “indica” (indicators) of potential terrorism. They include, as Ken Klippenstein reported:
“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, support for the overthrow of the United States Government, extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”


Do any of those sound like you? If Trump and Republicans continue down this road, get ready to have your life turned upside down as they tear apart your social media profiles, search your email and postal mail, surveil you, and one day bang on your door in the middle of the night.


And you don’t have to have actually done a thing. Trump’s order explicitly calls on the FBI and local police coordinating with them to “intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”

To go after you before you do anything, based entirely on who you are, who you love, what you believe, and what you say.

That is not the America our Founders, or the men and women who’ve fought and died to keep us free for 249 years, envisioned. And, again, the mainstream media almost entirely missed it while rightwing media ignored it altogether. Even though one day it may be directed against them if they say or do anything to offend Trump or his henchmen.


When Trump told the generals he would remove anyone who does not “agree with everything I say,” he also embraced the logic of tyrants who treat disagreement as insubordination.

Democracies rely on officers sworn to the Constitution, not to one man. Trump is trying to undo that distinction. He’s demanding personal loyalty backed by the threat of firing, demotion, or public shaming. Civilian control of the military that George Washington and James Madison insisted on becomes a hollow phrase when the civilian in charge demands the military serve his whims.

What once sounded like fringe rhetoric is now proclaimed loudly to the uniformed leadership of the United States. The generals who heard him are not hypothetical. They command forces, oversee operations, and embody the principle that the military does not exist to occupy American streets.

The notion that they should roll tanks into urban neighborhoods to harden troops for foreign war is not law enforcement: it’s preparation for ruling America by force, a force that may well be preparing for the November 2026 elections.


This is the kind of moment historians point back to later with disbelief. The warnings have been clear for years, but now the mask is off.

Even though our media insists on ignoring it, the Dictator’s Playbook has always included using a nation’s biggest cities as the stage for demonstrating power. It’s always required replacing officers and officials who follow the laws and traditions of a nation with loyalists who obey without question. It’s always depended on turning people against one another so Dear Leader and his lickspittles can step in as the only source of safety or authority.

Nobody can say this is a surprise: Trump pretty much campaigned on exactly what he’s doing now, and people from former intelligence, military, and FBI leaders to scholars of fascism warned us this was coming if Republicans suppressed enough votes for him to win. (Without the GOP having prevented 4.2 million registered citizen voters from voting or having their votes counted, Kamala Harris would have won and the House and Senate would today be under Democratic control).


The question now is whether Americans will accept a president who treats their hometowns as battle simulations and sees disagreement by generals and agency leaders as an offense punishable by firing, imprisonment, or exile.

As I point out in my new book The Last American President, it’ll depend on whether we’ll stand up and speak out. Or whether, like our media and so many universities, law firms, media outlets, and giant corporations, we’ll cower in fear and submit to Trump’s demands.

That is not law and order, and it’s not democracy in a free republic. It’s the language of autocracy that yesterday was spoken out loud in front of the armed forces of the United States and is echoed every time Trump attacks a reporter, media outlet, or one of his many “enemies.”

Will American democracy survive this onslaught, straight out of the Dictator’s Playbook? To a large extent, that will depend on you, me, and our elected officials summoning the courage to resist and protest loudly. And our media to call it out for what it is.

The clock is ticking, and these guys are racing for the finish line.